Every four years, every Sunday School in the Utah-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints turns its attention to the Old Testament. Only a single lesson over the course of that year is dedicated to Job, of which biblical book Victor Hugo said the following: “Tomorrow, if all literature was to be destroyed and it was left to me to retain one work only, I should save Job.” Forty minutes every four years—that’s not even enough time to get Latter-day Saints interested in Job, let alone to share something actually substantive about the book with them. If Mormons are to develop the kind of engagement with Job the book calls for, it’ll have to happen elsewhere.
So it is that Michael Austin, currently provost and an academic vice president at Newman University, has attempted to start up a conversation about Job that can’t be brought to a conclusion during a Sunday School meeting. A couple of months ago, Greg Kofford Books published his Re-reading Job: Understanding the Ancient World’s Greatest Poem, one of the first volumes to appear in the publisher’s Contemporary Studies in Scripture series. It’s a beautifully written book, the sort that makes me frustrated at my stilted academic prose and overly philosophical style of presentation. And it has moments of unmistakable interpretive genius (see especially Austin’s discussion of the violence and sexuality in Job 40!). And it does an enormous amount of the crucial work of packaging the findings of biblical scholars for a lay audience that will allow for more serious engagement with scripture.
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